“But it won’t! It can’t!”
“—What would become of the colony? We haven’t got anything like enough of a start to go ahead with, lacking you! I speak now without sentiment or foolish, womanly fears, but just on a common-sense, practical basis. Viewed at that angle, ought you to take the risk again?”
“There’s no time now, darling, to build more planes! No time to teach flying! We’ve got to recruit the colony as fast as possible, in case of emergencies. Why, I haven’t made a trip since—since God knows when! It’s time I was off now!”
“Allan!”
“Well?”
“Suppose you never went again? With the population we now have, and the natural increase, wouldn’t civilization reestablish itself in time?”
“Undoubtedly. But think how long it would take! Every additional person imported puts us ahead tremendously. I may never be able to bring all the Folk, all the Lanskaarn, and those other mysterious yellow-haired people they talk about from beyond the Great Vortex. But I can do my share, anyhow. Our boy here may have to complete the process. It may take a lifetime to accomplish the rescue, but it must be done!”
“So you’re determined to go again?”
“I am! I must!”
She seized his hand imploringly.
“And leave us? Leave your boy? Leave me?”
“Only to return soon, darling! Very soon!”
“But after this one trip, will you promise to train somebody else to go in your place?”
“I’ll see, dearest!”
“No, no! Not that! Promise!”
She had drawn his head down, and now her face close to his, was trembling in her eagerness.
“Promise! Promise me, Allan! You must!”
Suddenly moved by her entreaty, he yielded.
“I promise, Beta!” he exclaimed. “Gad, I didn’t know you were so deadly afraid of my little expeditions! If I’d understood, I might have been arranging otherwise already. But I certainly will change matters when I get back. Only let me go once more, darling—that’ll be the last time, I swear it to you!”
She gave a great sigh of relief unspeakable and kept silence. But in her eyes he saw the shine of sudden tears.
Allan had been gone more than four days and a half before Beatrice allowed herself to realize or to acknowledge the sick terror that for some hours had been growing in her soul.
His usual time of return had hitherto been just a little over three days. Sometimes, with favorable winds to the brink of the Abyss, and unusually strong rising currents of vapors from the sunken sea—from the Vortex, perhaps?—he had been able to make the round trip in sixty hours.
But now over a hundred and eight hours had lagged by since Beatrice, carrying the boy, had accompanied him up the steep path to the hangar in the palisaded clearing.
How light-hearted, confident, strong he had been, filled with great dreams and hopes and visions! No thought of peril, accident, or possible failure had clouded his mind.
She recalled his farewell kiss given to the child and to herself, his careful inspection of the machine, his short and vigorous orders, and the supreme skill with which he had leaped aloft upon its back and gone whirring up the sky till distance far to the northwestward had swallowed him.
And since that hour no sign of return. No speck against the blue. No welcome chatter of the engine far aloft, no hum of huge blades beating the summer air! Nothing!
Nothing save ever-growing fear and anguish, vain hopes, fruitless peerings toward the dim horizon, agonizing expectations always frustrated, a vast and swiftly growing terror.
Beatrice cringed from her own thoughts. She dared not face the truth.
For that way, she felt instinctively, lay madness.
CHAPTER XXI. ALLAN RETURNS NOT
FIVE days dragged past, then six, then seven, and still no sign of Allan came to lighten the terrible and growing anguish of the woman.
All day long now she would watch for him—save at such times as the care and nursing of her child mercifully distracted her attention a little while from the intolerable grief and woe consuming her.
She would stand for hours on the rock terrace, peering into the northwest; she would climb the steep path a dozen times a day, and in distraction pace the cliff-top inside the palisaded area, where now some few wild sheep and goats were penned in process of domestication.
Here she would walk, calling in vain his name to the uncaring winds of heaven. With the telescope she would untiringly sweep the far reaches of the horizon, hoping, ever hoping, that at each moment a vague and distant speck might spring to view, wing its swift way southeastward, resolve itself into that one and only blessed sight her whole soul craved and burned for—the Pauillac and her husband!
And so, till night fell, and her strained eyes could no longer distinguish anything but swimming mists and vapors, she would watch, her every thought a prayer, her every hope a torment—for each hope was destined only to end in disappointment bitterer far than death.
And when the shrouding dark had robbed her of all possibility for further watching she would descend with slow and halting steps, grief—broken, dazed, half-maddened, to the home-cavern—empty now, in spite of her child’s presence there—empty, and terrible, and drear!
Then would begin the long night vigil. Daylight gave some simulacrum of relief in action, some slight deadening of pain in the very searching of the sky, the strong, determined hope against what had now become an inner conviction of defeat and utter loss. But night—
Night! Nothing, then, but to sit and think, and think, and think, to madness! Sleep was impossible. At most, exhausted nature snatched only a few brief spells of semi-consciousness.
Even the sight of the boy, lying there sunk in his deep and healthy slumber, only kindled fresh fires of woe. For he was Allan’s child—he spoke to her by his mere presence of the absent, the lost, perhaps the dead man.
And at thought that now she might be already widowed and her boy fatherless, she would pace the rock-floor in terrible, writher crises of agony, hands clenched till the nails pierced the delicate flesh, eyes staring, face waxen, only for the sake of the child suppressing the sobs and heart-torn cries that sought to burst from her overburdened soul.
“Oh, Allan! Allan!” she would entreat, as though he could know and hear. “Oh, come back to me! What has happened? Where are you? Come back, come back to your boy—to me!”
Then, betimes, she would catch up the child and strain it to her breast, even though it awakened. Its cries would mingle with her anguished weeping; and in the firelit gloom of the cave they two—she who knew, and he who knew not—would in some measure comfort one another
On the eighth day she sustained a terrible shock, a sudden joy followed by so poignant a despair that for a moment it seemed to her human nature could endure no more and she must die.
For, eagerly watching the cloud-patched sky with the telescope, from the cliff-top—while on the terrace old Gesafam tended the child—she thought suddenly to behold a distant vision of the aeroplane!
A tiny spot in the heavens, truly, was moving across the field of vision!
With a cry, a sudden flushing of her face, now so wan and colorless, she seemed to throw all her senses into one sense, the power of sight. And though her hand began to shake so terribly that she could only with a great effort hold the glass, she steadied it against a fern-tree and thus managed to find again and hold the moving speck.
The Pauillac! Was it indeed the Pauillac and Allan?
“Merciful Heaven!” she stammered. “Bring him back—to me!”
Again she watched, her whole soul aflame with hope and eagerness and tremulous joy, ready to burst into a blaze of happiness—and then came disillusion and despair, blacker than ever and more terrible.
For suddenly the moving speck turned, wheeled and rose. One second she caught sight of wings. She knew now it was only some huge, tropic bird, afar on the horizon—some condor, vulture, or other creature of the air.
Then, as with a quick swoop, the vulture slid away and vanished behind a blue hill-shoulder, the woman dropped her glass, sank to earth, and—half-fainting—burst into a terrible, dry, sobbing plaint. Her tears, long since exhausted, would not flow. Grief could pass no further limits.
After a time she grew calmer, arose and thought of her child once more. Slowly she returned down the via dolorosa of the terrace-path, the walk where she and Allan had so often and so gaily trodden; the path now so barren, so hateful, so solitary.
To her little son she returned, and in her arms she cherished him—in her trembling arms—and the tears came at last, welcome and heart-stilling.
Old Gesafam, gazing compassionately with troubled eyes that blinked behind their mica shields, laid a comforting hand on the girl’s shoulder.
“Do not weep, O Yulcia, mistress!” she exclaimed in her own tongue. “Weep not, for there is still hope. See, all things are going on, as before, in the colony!” She gestured toward the lower caves, whence the sounds of smithy-work and other toil drifted upward. “All is yet well with us. Only our Kromno is away. And he will yet come! He will come back to us—to the child, to you, to all who love and obey him!”
Beatrice seized the old woman’s hand and kissed it in a burst of gratitude.
“Oh—if I could only believe you!” she sobbed.
“It will be so! What could happen to him, so strong, so brave? He must come back! He will!”
“What could happen? A hundred things, Gesafam! One tiny break in the flying boat and he might be hurled to earth or down the Abyss, to death! Or, among your Folk, he may have been defeated, for many of the Folk are still savage and very cruel! Or, the Horde—”
“The Horde? But the Horde, of which you have so often spoken, is now afar.”
“No, Gesafam. Even to-day I saw their signal-fires on the horizon.”
The old woman drew an arm about the girl. All barbarian that she was, the eternal, universal spirit of the feminine, pervading her, made her akin with the sorrowing wife.
“Go rest,” she whispered. “I understand. I, too have wept and mourned, though that was very long ago in the Abyss. My man, my Nausaak, a very brave and strong catcher of fish, fought with the Lanskaarn—and he died. I understand, Yulcia! You must think no more of this now. The child needs your strength. You must rest. Go!”
Gently, yet with firmness that was not to be disputed, she forced Beatrice into the cave, made her lie down, and prepared a drink for her.
Though Beta knew it not, the wise old woman had steeped therein a few leaves of the ronyilu weed, brought from the Abyss, a powerful soporific. And presently a certain calm and peace began to win possession of her soul.
For a time, however, distressing visions still continued to float before her disordered mind.. Now she seemed to behold the Pauillac, flaming and shattered, whirling down, over and over, meteor-swift, into the purple mists and vapors of the Abyss.
Now the scene changed; and she saw it, crushed and broken, lying on some far rock-ledge, amid impenetrable forests, while from beneath a formless tangle of wreckage protruded a hand—his hand—and a thin, dripping stream of red.
Gasping, she sought to struggle up and stare about her; but the drugged draft was too potent, and she could not move. Yet still the visions came again—and now it seemed that Allan lay there, in the woods, somewhere afar, transfixed with an envenomed spear, while in a crowding, hideous, jabbering swarm the distorted, beast-like anthropoids jostled triumphantly all about him, hacked at him with flints and knives, flayed and dismembered him, inflicted unimaginable mutilations—
She knew no more. Thanks to the wondrous beneficence of the ronyilu, she slept a deep and dreamless slumber. Even the child being laid on her breast by the old woman—who smiled, though in her eyes stood tears—even this did not arouse her.
She slept. And for a few blessed hours she had respite from woe and pain unspeakable.
At last her dreams grew troubled. She seemed caught in a thunder-storm, an earthquake. She heard the smashing of the lightning bolts, the roaring shock of the reverberation, then the crash of shattered buildings.
A sudden shock awoke her. She thought a falling block of stone had struck her arm. But it was only old Gesafam shaking her in terror.
“Oh, Yulcia, noa!” the nurse was crying in terror. “Up! Waken! The cliff falls! Awake, awake!”
Beatrice sat up in bed, conscious through all the daze of dreams quick broken, that some calamity—some vast and unknown peril—had smitten the colony at Settlement Cliffs.